Learning by Doing

Kevin Pennant, thanks for offering a dissection of my piece, especially for highlighting my comment that some individual behavior is the manifestation of stress and tension within a group. I’m thinking about how you see “stress and tension” as “the main ingredients for conflict” and the notion of happiness as a zero-sum game.

I’m highlighting this because of a conversation with Todd Hannula, where he is being amazingly receptive to having some of his “white privilege bias” named.

The thing is, everyone (here in Medium, say, to put a boundary in place) is — to a greater or lesser extent — trying to find and express a voice we can live with: intrapersonally (me with myself), interpersonally (me with others generally alike to me), and interculturally (me with others whose differences from me are salient).

Lots of trouble with the last one! Whiteness tends to erase intercultural distinctions.

The concept of valence (that I wrote about in the piece you’re responding to, about the relative simultaneity of events in Paris, Beirut, Yale, and Mizzou) might help with some kind of comprehension of why people are drawn to ‘performing’ or ‘enacting’ one or the other of an established, currently-popular or media-supported, self-replicating discourses (including me! Really, all of us.) To intervene in the reproduction of existing discourses requires detachment from them — the ability to perceive oneself as a contributor to, or co-generator of, the dynamics: me reading you writing to me — which could also be stated you reading me writing to you. It’s a cycle. Sometimes taking a bit of time away and coming back after other things have happened is useful to create an actual tangent in a new/different way rather than simply (quickly) repeating another loop through the same territory.

As I write back to you, Kevin, I’m thinking of a wider audience. (You probably were when you first wrote me, too — whom else do you hope to reach?) I’ve got specific people in mind, such as my partner in this endeavor, Soirée-Leone, those who have liked something we’ve written here on Medium (in particular Jasmine Minaya and Jasmine Y. Kent — who recommended specific entries in this particular thread, also Ben Roberts, Mike Thorpe and Joel Leon. — who said what me and Soiree are trying to do is “smart…emboldened”), people I’ve been more recently engaging with in a similar fashion in Todd’s thread (Jennifer Smith, Jillian C. York, Veronica Montes) and those not yet encountered who might be motivated to undertake a longer dialogue. I’m hoping these folk are similar to you and me, Kevin, in the way you said it, wanting the inflammatory rhetoric stripped away so we can buckle down and deal with asking better/different questions that can actually lead us to new/equitable social systems.

Excuses and defenses and denials are as toxic as hate speech, just more insidious because, in comparison, they exhibit a weak version of tolerance, perhaps what A.D. Carson told Chenjerai Kumanyika sound like “warm coffee voices.” By which I think he meant tepid white people talking around issues with neutral, passionless intonation. (Read the Medium story by Ernesto Aguilar referencing Kumanyiko’s Transom story about the whiteness of public radio; for an extensive list of related references and resources, go here).

Last week I read about “anticipated reproach” and “do-gooder derogation (the putting down of morally motivated others)” as an explanation for the criticism of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative…it struck me as a partial explanation for white fragility, too. Perhaps akin to what you were referring to when you wrote about the resentfulness of whites “as if something intangible would have to be given in exchange”? Many Whites may already be feeling the pinch of guilt for, say, not risking physical harm in protests such as #BlackLivesMatter or even for justifying their relative comfort as “hard-earned” as if structures of white privilege have nothing to do with the opportunities that allow Whites to earn in the first place. Most will just manage their discomfort and go on about their business: not really part of the solution while not overtly exacerbating the problem. A few (percentage-wise) will vocally ‘act out’ and speak the (so-called) unspoken or (supposedly) unspeakable. Just like those who keep silent are playing into the repetition of history, those who speak out will be repeating variations on themes . . . this is where the dynamics can really be brought into view — if enough of us are, like my pal Soiree-Leone, willing to be exposed (gulp) and explore (carefully, reflectively) the correlations we perceive with each other.

This space — as I understand the aims of Medium overall, and Dark Allies in particular — intends to be ‘a place in the middle’ of the typical patterns of interacting, where we can reflect deeply and attempt to work through some of the stickiness and motivate each other to increase and improve our efforts in our own spheres of influence: home, work, local neighborhoods and dispersed communities, all the way up the chain of institutions and government. It’s an open invitation. I have no idea what will come of it, but it seems necessary to try.